Paul Garrigan's Blog, page 8

What is Mindfulness Coaching?

Imagine you are visiting Nepal and out of nowhere you decide to climb Mount Everest. You are the kind of person who likes to be spontaneous. So, off you go towards the summit even though your knowledge of the mountain is limited to a couple of documentaries and something you read in a magazine on the plane ride into Kathmandu. This decision to ‘just go for it’ is certainly courageous, but the likelihood is you either give up in frustration or end up way out of your depth.

A much better approach to climbing Mount Everest might be to spend a few years preparing for this challenge. You could devote this time to researching the mountain, getting advice from people who have already done the climb, and training your body so you are prepared for the task ahead. Now, you are far more likely to reach the summit, but there is still a risk that you feel confused due to all the conflicting information and advice out there. Of course, there is also the problem that knowledge about climbing a mountain is not the same as climbing a mountain.

People who do decide to climb Mount Everest will usually enlist the help of a guide. This is a person who has already made it to the summit and therefore can guide them and support them every step of the way. It is a journey they take together.

A mindfulness coach is similar to a guide on Everest. The goal is to get you to your desired destination in the smoothest way possible. This needs to be somebody who understands the terrain and had already reached the place you are trying to get to.

What is the Summit We Are Trying to Reach?

We all have ideas about what needs to happen for us to be OK but really it is only the being OK that matters. For the sake of clarity, let’s refer to this OK’ness as ‘well-being’.

Many of us get stuck because of a belief that in order for us to be OK, the world needs to change. It is only when we recognize that the problem isn’t life but our relationship to life that we even have a chance of finding the well-being that we’ve been so desperately searching for. Then we realize that it is due to a lack of this well-being that we suffer from anxiety, fall into addiction, and generally struggle with life due to dissatisfaction and lack of purpose.

How Does Mindfulness Help in Our Search for Well-Being?

Initially, mindfulness gives us the ability to see how our current relationship with life is being created and sustained. We start to see how we are prisoners to mental habits and limiting stories about ourselves and the world. This then leads to insights that allow us to change our relationship with reality. We experience a deepening sense of trust, intimacy, and wonder, and we see that this is what is meant by ‘well-being’.

Trust is the ability to remain with the stream of experience without resistance. When we are able to do this we experience profound peace and stillness. It turns out that most of our issues are due to resisting life.

Intimacy is the realization that we are not separate from our experience. This understanding brings and end to our sense of disconnection and alienation. If we are not seperate from our experience then there is no seperate self that our experiences can be happening to.

Wonder is about returning to a more innocent relationship with life. We start to see how our mind creates stories about life that we mistake for the truth but that these stories act like prison bars to just limit us and make everything appear stale and unsatisfying. Wonder means returning to a relationship with reality that is similar to how many of us experienced things as young children.

How Mindfulness Coaching Works?

Hearing about somebody’s Mount Everest adventure is entertaining, but it is not the same as making the journey with them. For mindfulness coaching to work, it involves a commitment to taking steps towards well-being.

It is the job of the coach to offer direction, assess progress, and offer suggestions for dealing with any obstacles along the way. It is all about sharing of experience and offering support.

If you are interested in doing some mindfulness coaching with me, you can contact me at: info@paulgarrigan.com You can also find out more information here.

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How I Gave Up Alcohol 15 Years Ago at Wat Thamkrabok, Thailand

Can people really change? Fifteen years ago my life was in a total mess. I’d struggled with an alcohol addiction for almost two decades, and I no longer believed that it would be possible for me to change. I’d tried so many different approaches, yet the obsession to drink alcohol appeared more powerful than ever. There seemed to be no doubt that I was a hopeless case.

I decided to go to Thamkrabok on the understanding that if it didn’t work, I would never make another attempt to quit alcohol. The never-ending mental struggle of wanting to stop but not being able to had become unbearable. I would rather commit to drinking myself to death than continuing with that inner battle.

Something remarkable happened at that temple in Thailand. The compulsion to drink alcohol completely disappeared, and it has never come back. In the video below, I discuss why Wat Thamkrabok worked for me when all my other attempts to quit alcohol ended in failure.

If you are interested in doing some coaching with me, you can find out more information here or contact me at info@paulgarrigan.com

How I Gave Up Alcohol 15 Years Ago at Wat Thamkrabok, ThailandBlame, Shame, and AlienationMindfulness for Ultra RunnersAnger is a Lousy Coping Strategy – Try Love InsteadFalling in Love with the WorldThe post How I Gave Up Alcohol 15 Years Ago at Wat Thamkrabok, Thailand first appeared on Paul Garrigan Mindfulness Training.

Blame, Shame, and Alienation

I Once Hit a Girl

I once hit a girl in the head with a stone. I was six years old. That was also the day when I have my first memory of shame and shifting blame.

It happened at the back of the school playground. I was with some friends, and we were throwing stones out towards a bit of wasteland. I didn’t even realize that anyone had been hit until a teacher started screaming at me. It was scary and confusing, and I had certainly never intended to hit anyone. Luckily, the girl only had a small cut on her head.

Shame and Shifting the Blame

I knew that something bad had happened, and I knew that everyone was blaming me, but I didn’t understand how it could be my fault. I felt deep shame because it was if my body had somehow betrayed me. I was too careless. I was too hyper.

I didn’t even plan to be throwing stones. I just joined in with some other boys. Maybe they were the ones who were really to blame? What was that girl doing hiding in that bit of wasteland anyway? Surely, she was to blame as well?

The movie Jaws had recently come out, and there was a scene where two young boys scare everyone on the beach by moving a fake shark fin through the water. When they are caught, the reaction of one of the boys is to just blame the other one, ‘he made me do it’. This is a perfect example of blame-shifting. I can relate.

Who Is to Blame?

Blame divides the world up into culprits and victims. Life is not that simple though. When we are being pointed to as the culprit, our automatic response is  to shift the blame. We blame our circumstances, we point the finger at unfairness in the system, we blame other people, or we blame it on being misunderstood.

Even when we do accept that it was our fault, we do so in a way that still shifts the blame. We don’t see that shame and self-hatred are just another form of blame-shifting. This time the one who has let us down is ourselves (‘why did I do that?’), and we relate to ourselves as if we were a burden that we needed to carry.

Blame Leads to Alienation and Division

Blame is an artificial construct, and it is not a true reflection of life. It is based on the assumption that we humans are somehow separate from the rest of the universe and that our actions always appear to us as willful. Blame may be a necessary concept for a functioning society, but this doesn’t mean it is good for our mental health.

It is the need to place blame that creates a barrier between us and other people. It contributes to the alienation we feel in life – how can we feel connected to the world if we are blaming the world for our problems? It is also the source of the division inside of ourselves that leads to shame and self-hatred.

The Anecdote to Shame

The way we escape shame and heal the divisions in our life is to accept responsibility. This requires courageous compassion, and the recognition that we are more than just the voice in our head. We are our life – all of it.  It means welcoming our shadow (the bits of ourselves that we feel ashamed about) back into the light because we understand that when we push these parts of ourselves into the dark, they just fester.  It means refusing to create a barrier between ourselves, other people, and the rest of the world. We stand by who we are, and we accept the consequences of our actions.

If you would like to do some coaching with me, just fire me an email at info@paulgarrigan.com

Blame, Shame, and AlienationMindfulness for Ultra RunnersAnger is a Lousy Coping Strategy – Try Love InsteadFalling in Love with the WorldMy Gateway Experience – Re-Enchanting the Universe One Out-of-Body Experience at a TimeThe post Blame, Shame, and Alienation first appeared on Paul Garrigan Mindfulness Training.

Mindfulness for Ultra Runners

Introduction

One of the exciting things about ultra-running is it can teach us all the skills we need to successfully navigate life. On our journey, we learn to face hardships, deal with uncertainty, struggle with highs and lows, face our fears, and to keep going when it all appears hopeless. I think this is what we mean when we say that ‘running is our meditation’, it isn’t just what we do to let off steam, it is also opens our minds to life-changing insights. It can also lead to profound states of stillness in motion where we find a refuge from all of our hardships.  In fact, there are even Buddhist monks who use running as a path to enlightenment. 

“Endurance races are a microcosm of life; you’re high, you’re low, in the race, out of the race, crushing it, getting crushed, managing fears, rewriting stories.”

Travis Macy (The Ultra Mindset)

Mindfulness and perception training uses multiple tools (ways of looking) that we put to use in response to what is happening during a run. By learning to use these 7 tools while running, we are then able to apply them to our lives.

1. Get Grounded to Avoid Being Overwhelmed by Negative Thinking

On a challenging run, have you ever noticed how our thoughts are usually ready to give up long before the body is? In fact, when it comes to running longer distances, continuing to move forward despite what our thoughts are telling us to do is just as important as physical fitness . So why is it that our thinking seem to work against us like this and what can we do about it?

To understand why are thoughts can sabotage us, we need to look more closely at where these thoughts come from. We can have the sense that we are consciously choosing what we think, but the reality is that most of the time this internal chatter is coming from the unconscious mind. 

“You’re tougher than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can.”

Bryon Powell ( Relentless Forward Progress: A Guide to Running Ultramarathons)

It can be helpful to look at the unconscious mind as being similar to a warehouse. It is made up of our memories, interpretations based on our experiences, and things we have heard about who we are and how the world works. There is plenty of useful content in there, but it is also full of bad information, biased information, things we have misunderstood, and assumptions that have never been tested. An example of this would be the beliefs about what we are capable of doing.

The Parable of the Two Arrows

When we pay more attention to our thinking (this is what we mean by mindfulness), we are usually shocked at the state of  things. It is like crazy town in there. Even people who have never tried practices like meditation realize this because most of us would be horrified if there was a technology that allowed other people to listen in on our thoughts.

In Buddhism, there is the parable of the two arrows. Imagine you are out on the trails and somebody is lying in ambush to fire an arrow at you. This arrow represents the difficulties we experience on our human journey. Once such difficulties arise, there is much we can do other than deal with them. In this situation, the best thing to do would be to get away from the crazy person with the bow and arrows, and tend to our wound.

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.”

Haruki Murakami (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running)

What often happens when we are hit by one of life’s arrows is that we not only experience the pain of the event but also a negative mental reaction. We may start to dwell on how unfair it is that we have been hit by an arrow, how it shouldn’t have happened, or our thoughts can become fixated on how much we don’t want to experience this pain. Our thinking causes us to go into a state of resistance against what is happening, and this more than doubles are hardship. One of the goals of mindfulness is to limit the impact of this second arrow.

Moving Attention to the Five Senses

So, our first tool is learning to move our attention to the five senses (we refer to this as ‘getting grounded’) any time we start to feel overwhelmed by negative thinking. It is important to point out that we are not trying to stop the thoughts, we are just moving our attention elsewhere. What this does is it gives us relief from the negative thinking while also putting us into a state of increased mindfulness where we become less bothered by thoughts and feelings. This happens because when you are choosing to put your attention on your body and your environment, you must know what your mind is currently doing (this is what mindfulness means).

So, how would this work in real life? It is important that you regularly practice getting grounded so that you will remember to do it when you really need it. When you are out running, or just going about your daily routine, bring your attention back to your body and your environment. Notice physical sensations in the body, pay more attention to your environment ( a useful trick is to look at your surroundings as if you were seeing them for the first time – see running in a state of wonder below), Notice how the thoughts will eventually try to distract you. Mindfulness is a skill, and the more you do it, the better you will get at it.

Key point: mindfulness means being aware of what your mind is doing. This can be incredibly helpful because it lessens the intensity of our thoughts and feelings. It also leads to life-changing insights into how our mind functions.

Simple mindfulness practice

Imagine there is a balloon in your tummy. Notice as you inhale that the balloon inflates, and how it deflates as you exhale. Keep your attention on the balloon as it inflates and deflates. If you notice that your attention has wandered off into thinking, just simply come back to the balloon in your tummy. Do this for 5 to 10 minutes or longer.

2. Develop Resilience For When Things Get Hard – Finding the Light in the Pain Cave

When we talk about resilience we are referring to the ability to deal with whatever life throws our way. A key element of this is self-compassion where we are able to be with uncomfortable physical and emotional challenges in a way that is soothing.

One way runners can deal with uncomfortable physical symptoms while running is to use distraction. We can take our mind off things by diving into some fantasy in our heads. Distraction works to a certain extent, and it can be a useful tool to have, but the problem is that avoidance doesn’t increase our ability to deal with uncomfortable experiences (if it did, things like alcohol abuse would be considered a skill rather than an affliction). What can happen on a long-run is that we reach such a state of exhaustion that we just don’t have the energy to distract ourselves anymore. If we don’t have the skill-set to face discomfort head-on, we are going to be in big trouble.

Learning to be with discomfort is another skill that we can master simply by doing it. In some meditation traditions, the yogi is expected to sit for hours without moving in order to lessen their resistance to unpleasant sensations. This is not something you will need to do, as you will already be facing plenty of challenging body sensations while on a difficult run. Just start moving your attention to these sensations, and develop your ability to stay with them. It’s similar to weight-lifting in that it is better to begin with small aches and pains until we build up our strength.

I mentioned above that self-compassion is the ability to be with discomfort in a way that is soothing, so this needs to be more than just observing the discomfort. In fact, just putting our attention on discomfort can make it worse because we start to tense-up or wish it wasn’t there. In order to apply self-compassion we need to bring our attention to discomfort but without any resistance to it.

Once we get used to bringing our attention to unpleasant sensations without resistance them, we are likely to find that they can be easy to be with. It is often the trying to get away from the discomfort that is the problem rather than the discomfort itself. The fact that we no longer need to ignore discomfort in the body means we are no in much better position to recognize the signs of potentially serious issues.

3. Zooming-In and Zooming-Out of Pain

There are two ways of using our perception that are particularly good for dealing with discomfort, and I suggest you get used to playing around with both of them.

Zooming-in on discomfort means concentrating on the physical sensations directly. This would mean all of your attention if you are sitting down, or most of your attention (the amount you can give while continuing to move safely) while out running. What can happen when we focus directly on the sensations is they start to appear more wavelike, and it can be hard to pinpoint what exactly is painful about them. It can start to seem like pain is a mirage, and the thing that makes it so difficult is when we contract around the mirage.

Zooming-out is when we avoid concentrating directly on our discomfort and instead experience it as part of a much larger experience. The logic here is that if you put a teaspoon of salt into a cup of water, it will taste salty, but if you put it into a bath full of water, you would hardly notice it. To make this work you stretch your awareness to take in as much of your surroundings as you can. Be aware of your peripheral vision. Attempt to pull in information from all of the senses. See yourself as a part of your whole environment and not limited to the sensations of pain.

4. How Appreciation Keeps You Going Between and During Runs

Appreciation is one of the most important skills we can learn in life, and it can also be of immense benefit to our journey as an ultra-runner. When we are appreciating our surroundings, it pulls us out of our heads and into our environment. To appreciate means to be interested in and see the value in whatever we are experiencing. The problem many of us have in life isn’t so much that we are lacking things, but we have lost the ability to appreciate what we have.

Appreciation is one of the reasons we enjoy going on vacation so much. If we are in a new and interesting environment, our attention is going to be attracted outwards, and this provides an escape from our usual concerns and preoccupations. It is easier to appreciate things when they are new, but once we get used to them, the tendency is for our attention to return to the old stories that make up so much of our mental life.

The skill of appreciation involves learning to deliberately become interested in our experience right now (even if we are in familiar surroundings). This is a skill that people who plan to meditate regularly need to master. If we are asked to focus on something like the breath, and we have no interest in the breath, it will be impossible to keep our attention on the breath for long. It is only by appreciating the breath that we are able to focus on it – the more we can do this, the easier it will be to stay concentrated on the breath. The more we can appreciate our surroundings while out on our runs, the more enjoyable it will be. It is like going on vacation every time you put on your running shoes. It means you have a refuge from the ups and downs of life, and this is going to be rejuvenating. The fact that our runs become far more enjoyable also mean we are more motivated to do them.

5. Running in a State of Wonder

A useful trick for appreciating runs is to learn how to perceive with the perception of wonder. This requires letting go of all of our ideas about what we are experiencing and looking with fresh eyes. It means seeing the world like a young child might – going back to that time when everything appeared new and full of possibility. 

I discovered a number of tricks that allowed me to easily access this state of wonder. These might work for you too, or they inspire you to come up with your own tricks.

A couple of years ago, I bought my son a virtual reality headset for his PlayStation. This gift was just as much for me as for him, and I ended up spending a lot more hours on it then him. I was just so impressed by how real everything seemed. I noticed that even after I took off the headset, I would continue to experience a heightened interest in my environment.

I lost interest in PlayStation VR after a few weeks, but I started to use my imagination to recreate this experience when I was out running, walking, or driving. I would pretend that what I was experiencing was virtual reality, and it would immediately fill me with a sense of wonder. I would become totally absorbed by my surroundings, and I’d experience an intense sense of appreciation.

Another trick that I would use was to pretend that I was dreaming. This would be another way to direct my attention to the environment while being impressed by how real everything seemed.

The ability to move into a state of wonder is a useful tool to have. It will mean you instantly become grounded (by focusing on your environment rather than your inner dialogue), and you will be able to appreciate your environment. This will also make your runs even more enjoyable and rememberable.  

6. How Love Can Help You Go That Extra Mile

“it’s easy to get outside yourself when you’re thinking about someone else.”

Christopher McDougall (Born to Run)

Fear is a powerful driving force, but it fails once the discomfort of what we are trying to achieve reaches a certain point. An example of this might be pushing ourselves to finish a race because we fear what other people might think if we DNF. There could well come a point where we decide that we would rather people think we are weak than to go on feeling the discomfort.

Surprisingly, we can be better at facing hardships when we are doing it for someone else rather than just ourselves. Maybe this is why so many people will run to sponsor charities.

“We wouldn’t be alive without love we wouldn’t have survived without running. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.”

Christopher McDougall (Born to Run)

My first ultra was on a 2.5km track in Bangkok. I decided to dedicate each loop to someone I loved. This gave the race a deeper meaning for me, and it made the whole thing joyous.  

7. Finding Stillness in Motion

“The longer and farther I ran, the more I realized that what I was often chasing was a state of mind-a place where worries that seemed monumental melted away, where the beauty and timelessness of the universe, of the present moment, came into sharp focus.”

Scott Jurek (Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness)

We start to experience stillness in those moments when we are not resisting anything. When this happens, we are completely at one with ourselves and our surroundings. As you begin to practice with tools we have discussed already, you will experience stillness more and more in your life. Instead of it being a state that you only rarely encounter when the conditions happen to right, you now understand how to create those conditions. You learn that stillness doesn’t come about by doing something, but instead by not doing something. We experience this wonderful state when we are not carried away by our thinking and when we are not avoiding whatever it is we are feeling or experiencing.

Ultra-Running as a Path to Well-Being

As you practice these tools while out running, you will start to notice that they naturally find their way into your daily life. Even if you don’t have a regular sitting meditation practice, you will enjoy similar benefits to what a long-term meditator might expect. You will find your ability to face the ups and downs of life has improved, and that you naturally gravitate towards periods of stillness during the day – this greatly benefits both your physical and mental health. Most of all, you find that you are just better able to enjoy your life, and you start to develop an almost unshakable sense of well-being.

If you would like to do some mindfulness coaching with me, please contact me at info@paulgarrigan.com

Here is a video of my first 100km race.

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Anger is a Lousy Coping Strategy – Try Love Instead

Anger Made Me Brave

I grew up on the outskirts of Dublin. This meant that I only needed to walk a couple of miles, and I would be in the middle of the countryside. At the weekends, I would visit my aunts and uncles who lived in what was then a rural location (it has all become more built-up in recent years). To get to their house, I would need to pass an old church with a graveyard, and this was a problem because I was terrified of ghosts.

There wasn’t much traffic on the road that passed the graveyard, so as a kid I would feel alone and vulnerable during this part of the journey. If a car came along, I’d feel safe, but long minutes could go by without seeing any traffic. So, what I would do is just run as fast as I could to get well away from the dead people in the ground.

Then one day I was feeling angry about something, and I hardly noticed walking past the old church. I realized right then that anger could work as an anecdote for fear, so from then on I would make myself angry so I could bravely walk past the graves. This then became something that I applied to other things until my habitual response to fear was to get angry.

Later on, I discovered that anger could also ease the pain of rejection, and I could sometimes use it to get my own way – if I was in trouble I decided that the best response was to go on the attack (verbally at least). Eventually anger became my go-to response to pretty much everything, and it didn’t take long for the negative effects to become obvious. By then, anger had become a habit, and it didn’t feel like a choice anymore.

Lessons About Facing Fear from Thai Forest Monks

It turns out that anger is a terrible response to most things in life. Years later, I discovered that the forest monks here in Thailand used a different approach to fear. They would spend long periods wandering through jungles where they would face many dangers such as wild elephants, wild tigers, venomous snakes, and all kinds of other potentially lethal encounters. Like me, many of them were also afraid of ghosts too. Unlike me though, they didn’t use anger as a coping strangely but instead practiced friendliness.

During my years working as a nurse, I got to spend time with patients who were in the process of dying. I saw that in this situation there were some who responded to it with a deep sense of love and friendliness, and these were the ones who appeared to have the easiest deaths. It sounds counterintuitive, but it can be the people who most love life and other people that find it easiest to let go?

Love is a Better Response than Anger

It sounds like such a cliché, but the solution to most problems in life is simply love. Anger can make us feel temporarily stronger, but it is toxic in large doses. When we respond to fear, loss, and rejection with love, we not only escape our suffering, but we also plant seeds that will blossom into something beautiful later on. Love and friendliness becomes a habit that moves our life towards peace rather than disaster.

In this video, I suggest a practice that can help us develop the ability to respond with love rather than anger:

If you are interested in doing some coaching with me, you can find out more about this by clicking here.

The post Anger is a Lousy Coping Strategy – Try Love Instead first appeared on Paul Garrigan Mindfulness Training.

Falling in Love with the World

It seems silly now, but I once believed that life needed to be a certain way for me to even be able to tolerate it. I needed to be in the right mood. I needed things to go my way. I needed to achieve my dreams. I needed people to appreciate me more. Such foolishness.

I saw myself as a consumer of the world rather than the creator of it, and I was far from a happy customer. I wanted to complain to the manager of this shitshow but could never find anyone willing to take responsibility, so I just blamed other people instead. I didn’t realize that ‘the manager’ stared back at me each time I looked in the mirror.

Beauty Comes from Within

I stubbornly persisted with the ludicrous notion that it was the world that wrong for decades. I blamed the world for my own inner turmoil. I couldn’t see that it was my inner resistance to life that was creating my external nightmare.

Beauty comes from within. I call this beauty ‘stillness’, an it is the recognition of this same stillness in the external world that causes me to fall in love with it. It is because I no longer need anything from the external world (this stillness is always there no matter what) that makes this love unconditional. The strangest thing is that the less I need life to go my way, the more it seems to.

I no longer need the world to fix me because it was only the stillness that was ever required. I realized the real motivation behind every one of my desperate attempt to exert my will on the world was only ever to get closer to the wholeness that is found in stillness. I needn’t have bothered because it was always already there. In fact, my efforts to find wholeness made it seem like I was further away than ever.

‘For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.’

Wendell Berry (from his poem ‘ The Peace of Wild Things’)

The world is such a beautiful place when we stop resisting it. Everything we want is already here. Everything that we think we want can only give us what is already here.

In this video, I talk more about falling in love with the world.

If you are interested in working with me, please click here.

The post Falling in Love with the World first appeared on Paul Garrigan Mindfulness Training.

My Gateway Experience – Re-Enchanting the Universe One Out-of-Body Experience at a Time

I became interested in the Gateway Experience back in 2012. Prior to this, I had some experience with lucid dreaming, and I’d encountered plenty of strange happenings in meditation, but I’d been trained to treat such things as distractions.

I’d been practicing vipassana meditation for years, and I’d definitely made progress in regards to developing inner-peace, but it just felt like something important was missing in my life. I had memories from early childhood of reality having a ‘magical’ quality, and it was the desire to get this back that kicked-off my spiritual quest in the first place. I had found peace, but my life felt a bit dry.

I began looking deeper into lucid dreaming, and I came across the book ‘Journeys Out of Body’ by Robert Monroe. I ended up reading all of his books, and this got me interested in his course ‘The Gateway Experience’. It was an expensive program (for my budget), but it just felt like something that I needed to do.

Introduction to Robert Monroe

My attraction to the Gateway Experience troubled me at the time. There was an inner voice that was screaming ‘can’t you see this is complete woo-woo, and if you keep going like this you will end up in cult waiting for a magical flying saucer to take you to the next level’. There was also a fear that I was somehow being disloyal to the teachings of Buddhism that had given me so much so far (this idea turned out to be nonsense).

I’ve always had a bit of a rebellious streak, and I think it was this that gave me the push to start the Gateway Experience program. It took me awhile to shake the feeling that I was being ‘naughty’ or ‘gullible’, but I’m so glad that I persisted with it.

Emptiness and the Gateway Experience

My vipassana training meant that I had gained some insight into emptiness. This gave me an advantage because I no longer saw things in terms of ‘real’ or ‘unreal’. I had also given up on the idea of ‘Truth’ a long time ago. When it came to perception, the question wasn’t ‘is this real?, but ‘is this useful?’. I already knew that the mind could produce incredibly convincing experiences (e.g. past life memories), so I was able to encounter strange things without becoming attached or trying to convince myself of other people that these experiences were ‘Real’.

What I Got From the Gateway Experience

I spent about a year playing around with the Gateway Experience, and it helped to free my imagination. I could see that I’d been conditioned into viewing reality in a certain way, and it was liberating to perceive in new ways. Of course, these new ways of perceiving were just as empty as the old ways of perceiving, but it allowed me to see how there is a choice in how we relate to reality. If you want to re-enchant the universe, all you need to do is gaze at it with a sense of wonder.

These days I don’t go out of my way to encourage people to do the Gateway Experience (I don’t discourage people either). It was an important part of my own journey but only because it entered my life at the right time. I think our willingness to drop any preconceived notions we have about reality is far more important than any program or approach. It has also been my experiecne that when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

There were lots of ideas that I played around with during those Gateway days that I’ve lost interest in. I no longer view consciousness as the main thing because I’ve found something far more wonderful that appears to exists beyond it. I call this stillness.

After the Gateway Experiences

The Gateway Experience introduced me to the world of the imaginal. I started to see how images that appeared in dreams or in meditation could open me up to completely new ways of experiencing reality. Then I came across Buddhist teachers like Rob Burbea who were also talking about the intersection between emptiness and the imaginal. I rediscovered the wonder that I had lost in early childhood, and the world I live in today is an enchanted place.

Ultimately though, my journey led me to stillness. This is where all perceptions arise and fall away. It is the home I always longed for, and it is the source of wonder, trust, and intimacy – it is the source of all of it.

If you are interested in doing some mindfulness coaching with me, you can find out more information here.

Check out my YouTube videos here and podcast here.

Here are some of my orignal posts on the Gateway Experience from 2012:

Out of Body with the Monroe Gateway Experience
Early Astral Explorations with the Monroe Gateway Experience
ARRIVAL AT FOCUS 15 WITH THE GATEWAY EXPERIENCE
Continuing Adventures with Hemi Sync Gateway Experience

The post My Gateway Experience – Re-Enchanting the Universe One Out-of-Body Experience at a Time first appeared on Paul Garrigan Mindfulness Training.

Motivated Reasoning

We humans tend to rely on motivated reasoning. We believe in things based on the ability of these ideas to reassure us or reaffirm how we view ourselves and the world. When our precious reasoning is questioned, the easiest conclusion to make is that other people are deluded or possibly evil. We believe that we are the ones who can see what is ‘really going on’, and utopia awaits if we can only get everyone else on the same page.

The only way out of this mess is to question our own reasoning. Instead of clinging onto our beliefs, we become humble enough to admit how little we actually know. We start to see that so much of what we believe is just a response to fear. Even our most rational thoughts may be little more than magical thinking. Instead of turning to the thinking-mind to provide more bricks for our mental prison, we turn to stillness for our escape.

If you would like to do some coaching with me, you can find out more by clicking here.

Don’t forget to check out the podcast and YouTube channel.

The post Motivated Reasoning first appeared on Paul Garrigan Mindfulness Training.

Conflicting Thoughts – Why Does Our Mind Pull Us in Different Directions?

Why does it appear as if there are competing agendas within our mind that are often in conflict with one another?

For example, we may have a yearning to get on better with other people, and yet we still find ourselves becoming judgmental and saying hurtful things. Why does this happen?

The problem is that over the years we have responded to challenging events by adapting new patterns of thinking and new ways of reacting. These constellation of thoughts are sort of like mini-personalities and because they have been created in response to specific events, they can easily come in conflict with other parts of our personality.

As a young kid, I was a bit gullible. I remember some older boys persuaded me to walk around the town where I was living dressed in safety clothing from their parent’s hardware shop. I looked like an alien. The idea was that I would help them advertise their shop. They didn’t pay me anything, but I was delighted to be allowed hang around with those older boys.

I felt proud of my new job, but when I told my parents, they suggested that I had been taken advantage of. I felt ashamed. I swore that I would never allow people to make a fool of of me like that again, and thus a new personality was born that is still alive within me today. It also created an internal conflict between wanting to be liked and not wanting to be made a fool of.

I have found that the secret to escaping the conflict between the different personalities within us is to not identify with any of them. This is what mindfulness is all about. When these thought patterns are allowed to just arise and pass in stillness, they lose their sharp edges, and a sense of harmony begins to take hold in the mind. Now, instead of ongoing battle in our mind, we experience unification and common cause in the realization of stillness.

If you are interested in doing some coaching with me, you can find out more here.

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Conflicting Thoughts – Why Does Our Mind Pull Us in Different Directions?Stillness – The End of Jealousy, Envy, and BelittlingCompassion, Emptiness, and the ImaginalYou Are Truly WonderfulNew Podcast – A Simple Path to Well-BeingThe post Conflicting Thoughts – Why Does Our Mind Pull Us in Different Directions? first appeared on Paul Garrigan Mindfulness Training.

Stillness – The End of Jealousy, Envy, and Belittling

Jealousy, Envy, and Belittling

I was talking to a client recently about the difference between jealousy and envy. These are two of the most unattractive of all human traits, and I’ve been all too familiar with both of them in my own life.

I would regularly feel envy towards those who seemed to get all the breaks (e.g. the ones who were better looking, came from a rich family, or seemed to get away with all kinds of bullshit). I would then feel jealous of those were a potential rival, and the idea that they could take what was ‘mine’ could keep me awake at night.

Another ugly human trait that I feel is related to jealousy and envy is belittling. This is where we put other people down in order to make ourselves feel better. I did more than my fair share of that as well.

They say that behaviors such as jealousy, envy, and belittling are all due to low self-esteem, and I can see the truth in that, but I feel this just touches the surface of the problem. The real issue is that when we live in a world of scarce resources, we understandably feel threatened when we don’t seem to be getting our fair share.

There May Be No Winners in the Game of Life

Sometimes, the fear of losing out can motivate us to become a competitor in the game of life. We can focus our energies on building a career, winning the perfect romantic partner, gaining respect, achieving academic qualifications, accumulating power, filling up our bank account, and collecting expensive stuff. Unfortunately, the ones who do this can find that they feel more insecure than ever. As George Harrison once said;

“Everybody dreams of being rich and famous. But once you get rich and famous, you think, ‘This isn’t it.”

If we fail at the game of life, there is always cognitive dissonance to fall back on. We can console ourselves with the idea that the rich are miserable, the academically-successful lack all common sense, and the perfect couple is a sham (she’s only with him for his money). This way we can still pretend that we won, and that life’s winners are actually the losers.

What if there are no real winners in the game of life? Sure, some of us can be more financially secure, and have nice things, but is that all there is to it? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t want success, but could it be that we are putting way too much emphasis on these things? What if it is our obsession with how well am I doing compared to other people that causes of our depression and anxiety? Is the nastiness that is created by jealousy, envy, and belittling a price worth paying?

Stillness is Where Everyone Is a Winner

The most precious thing I know is stillness. It is this that gives me everything I once believed could come through wealth, respect, and getting people to like me. The wonderful thing about stillness is there can be no rivals when it comes to our relationship to it. There is an infinite amount of stillness to go around, and it is not something we need to earn. We are all equal before stillness, so there is simply no need for envy, jealousy, or belittling. The competition is over, and we all truly end up as winners.

When I look at other people now, I no longer see them as rivals in the game of life. We all have our little part to play in the world, but we are all equally wealthy when it comes to stillness. Sure, some of us may be less aware than others about this incredible fortune inside of us, but this doesn’t make us any less rich. It just means there is this incredible discovery yet to be made.

If you would like to do some mindfulness coaching with me, please send an email to: info@paulgarrigan.com . I guide clients to a deeper experience of stillness and well-being (i.e. a relationship with life based on trust, intimacy, and wonder).

Stillness – The End of Jealousy, Envy, and BelittlingCompassion, Emptiness, and the ImaginalYou Are Truly WonderfulNew Podcast – A Simple Path to Well-BeingHow Can You Have Trust When It Feels Like Your Life is Falling Apart?The post Stillness – The End of Jealousy, Envy, and Belittling first appeared on Paul Garrigan Mindfulness Training.